Bringing Up Bebe (16 page)

Elisabeth, a French mother living in Brooklyn, was surprised that American parents were so invested in their children’s success at sports. She writes that she had to repeatedly change the date and time of her ten-year-old’s birthday party to accommodate the match schedules of his American friends. Each American mother described her own child’s presence at the match as “indispensable,” and claimed that without him or her, “they might lose!”
⁵

The American push to excel often begins before kids can walk. I hear about a mother in New York whose one-year-old had at-home tutors in French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. When her child was two, the mother dropped the French but added lessons in art, music, swimming, and some sort of math. Meanwhile the mother, who’d quit her job as a management consultant, was spending most of her time applying to two dozen preschools.

Such stories aren’t just the province of a few extreme New Yorkers. On a trip to Miami I have lunch with a particularly sane American mother I know, named Danielle. I had thought that if anyone could resist the lure of the frenetic family, she could. She’s levelheaded, warm, and—in a city where people tend to closely follow trends in jewelry—decidedly nonmaterialistic. She spent part of her childhood in Italy, speaks three languages, and is generally comfortable in her own skin. She also has an MBA and a résumé full of high-powered marketing jobs.

Danielle dislikes overzealous parenting. She’s horrified by a mother in her neighborhood whose four-year-old son already takes tennis, soccer, French, and piano lessons. Danielle says this mother is extreme, but simply having her around makes everyone anxious.

“You start thinking: This kid’s doing all that stuff. How is my kid going to compete? And then you have to check yourself and say: That’s not the point. We don’t want him competing with someone like that.”

Nevertheless, Danielle has found herself sliding into a practically nonstop schedule with her own four kids (the youngest are twins). In a typical week her seven-year-old, Juliana, has soccer on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Communion class on Wednesday, Brownies every other Thursday (after soccer), and a playdate on Fridays. Once Juliana gets home, s { geionhe has two hours of homework.

“Last night she had to write a folk tale, she had to write a mini-essay on how Martin Luther King changed America, and she had to study for a Spanish test,” Danielle says.

Recently Juliana said she wanted to take an after-school ceramics class, too. “And me, feeling guilty because there’s no art at the school, said ‘okay, let’s do ceramics.’ The only day she had free was Monday.” Juliana’s whole week is now booked. And Danielle has three other kids.

“The logistics of making sure everyone gets to where they need to be at the correct time has been the best use of the skills I acquired in Operations Management class in business school,” she says.

Danielle acknowledges that she could simply cut out all these activities, except for soccer (her husband is the coach). But what would her kids do at home? She says there’d be no other children around in the neighborhood, since they’re all out doing activities, too.

The net result is that Danielle hasn’t gone back to work. “I always thought that when my kids got to elementary school I could get a full-time job again,” she says. Then she apologizes and rushes off to her car.

The fact that
the French state provides and subsidizes child care certainly makes life easier for French mothers. But when I get back to France, I’m struck by how French mothers make their own lives a lot easier, too. The French equivalent of a playdate is that I drop off Bean at her friend’s house, then I leave. (My Anglophone friends assume I’ll stay the whole time.) French parents aren’t curt; they’re practical. They correctly assume that I have other stuff to do. I sometimes stay for a cup of coffee when I return for the pickup.

It’s the same at birthday parties. American and British mothers expect me to stick around and socialize, often for several hours. No one ever says it, but I think part of why we’re there is to make sure our kids are comforted and okay.

But by the time a child is three, French birthday parties are drop-offs. We’re supposed to trust that our kids will be okay without us. Parents are usually invited to come back at the end for a glass of champagne and some hobnobbing with the other moms and dads. Simon and I are thrilled whenever we get invitations: it’s free babysitting, followed by a cocktail party.

In France, there’s an expression for mothers who spend all their free time schlepping their kids around:
maman-taxi
. This isn’t a compliment. Nathalie, a Parisian architect, tells me that she hires a babysitter to bring her three kids to all their activities on Saturday mornings. She and her husband go out to lunch. “When I’m there I give them 100 percent, but when I’m off, I’m off,” Nathalie tells me.

Virginie, my diet guru, gets together most mornings with a group of moms from her son’s elementary school. I join the group one morning and mention extracurricular activities. The temperature at the table immediately rises. Virginie sits up and speak { upmors for the group. “You have to leave kids alone, they need to be a bit bored at home, they must have time to play,” she says.

Virginie and her friends aren’t slackers. They have college degrees and nice résumés. They’re devoted mothers. Their homes are full of books. Their kids take lessons in fencing, guitar, tennis, piano, and wrestling (weirdly called
catch
in French). But most just choose one activity per school term.

One of the moms at the café, a pretty, zaftig publicist (like me, she’s trying to “pay more attention”), says she stopped sending her kids to tennis lessons, or anything else, because she found the lessons “constraining.”

“Constraining for whom?” I ask.

“Constraining for me,” she says.

She explains: “You bring them and you wait for an hour, then you have to go back and pick them up. For music you have to make them practice at night . . . It’s a waste of time for me. And the children don’t need it. They have a lot of homework, they have the house, they have other games at the house, and there are two of them so they can’t get bored. They’re together. And we go away every weekend.”

I’m struck by how these small decisions and assumptions make daily life different for French mothers. When they have moments to spare, French mothers pride themselves on being able to detach and relax. At the hairdresser, I tear out an article from an issue of French
Elle
in which a mother says that she loves taking her two boys to the old-fashioned merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower.

“While Oscar and Léon try to catch the wooden rings . . . I spend thirty minutes in pure relaxation. I usually turn off my cell phone and I just space out while I’m waiting for them . . . it’s like a deluxe babysitter!” I know that merry-go-round well. I usually spend my half hour there waiting to wave at Bean each time she comes around.

It’s no coincidence
that so many French mothers seem to parent this way. The let-them-be principle comes straight from Françoise Dolto, the patron saint of French parenting. Dolto very clearly argued for leaving a child alone, safely, to muddle about and figure things out for herself.

“Why does a mother do everything for her child?” Dolto asks in
The Major Stages of Childhood
, a collection of her remarks. “He’s so content to deal with things himself, to pass the morning getting dressed by himself, to put on his shoes, so happy to put on his sweater backwards, to get tangled up in his pants, to play, to rummage around in his corner. So he doesn’t go to the market with his mother? Well too bad, or even better!”

On Bastille Day, I take Bean to the grassy field in our neighborhood park. It’s filled with parents and their young kids. I’m not narrating Bean’s play, but I don’t really expect to have a chance to read the three-week-old magazine that I’ve brought along for myself, along with a giant sack of books and toys for her. I spen {r hhe d a lot of the day helping her play with the toys and reading to her.

On the next blanket over is a French mother. She’s a thin, auburn-haired woman who’s chatting with a girlfriend while her year-old daughter plays with, well, not much of anything. The mother seems to have brought just one ball to amuse her daughter for the entire afternoon. They have lunch, and then the little girl plays with the grass, rolls around a bit, and checks out the scene. Meanwhile, her mother has a full adult conversation with her friend.

It’s the same sun and the same grass. But I’m having an American picnic and—
voilà
—she’s having a French one. Not unlike those mothers back in New York, I’m trying to cheer Bean on to the next stage of development. And I’m willing to sac
rifice my own pleasure to do that. The French mom—who looks as though she could buy a fancy handbag if she wanted to—seems content to let her daughter “awaken” all by herself. And her little girl evidently doesn’t mind at all.

All this goes
a long way toward explaining the mysteriously calm air of French mothers I see all around me. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a crucial missing piece. That ghost in the French mothering machine is, I think, how Frenchwomen cope with guilt.

Today’s American mothers spend much more time on child care than parents did in 1965.
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To do so, they have cut back on housework, relaxing, and sleeping. Nevertheless, today’s parents believe they should be spending even more time with their kids.

The result is enormous guilt. I see this when I visit Emily, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their eighteen-month-old daughter. After I’ve been with Emily for a few hours, it dawns on me that she has said “I’m a bad mother” a half-dozen times. She says it when she caves in to her daughter’s demand for extra milk or when she doesn’t have time to read her more than two books. She says it again when she’s trying to make the little girl sleep on a schedule and to explain why she occasionally lets her cry a bit at night.

I hear other American moms say “I’m a bad mother,” too. The phrase has become a kind of verbal tic. Emily says “I’m a bad mother” so often that, though it sounds negative, I realize that she must find the phrase soothing.

For American mothers, guilt is an emotional tax we pay for going to work, not buying organic vegetables, or plopping our kids in front of the television so we can surf the Internet or make dinner. If we feel guilty, then it’s easier to do these things. We’re not just selfish. We’ve “paid” for our lapses.

Here, too, the French are different. French mothers absolutely recognize the temptation to feel guilty. They feel as overstretched and inadequate as we Americans do. After all, they’re working while bringing up small children. And like us, they often aren’t living up to their own standards as either workers or parents.

The difference is that French mothers don’t valorize this guilt. To the contrary, they consider it unhe {sidth="2ealthy and unpleasant, and they try to banish it. “Guilt is a trap,” says my friend Sharon, the literary agent. When she and her Francophone girlfriends meet for drinks, they remind each other that “the perfect mother doesn’t exist . . . we say this to reassure each other.”

The standards are certainly high for French moms. They’re supposed to be sexy, successful, and have a home-cooked meal on the table each night. But they try not to add guilt to their burden. My friend Danièle, the French journalist, coauthored a book called
The Perfect Mother Is You
(
La mère parfaite, c’est vous
).

Danièle still remembers dropping her daughter off at her crèche at five months old. “I felt sick to leave her, but I would have felt sick to stay with her and not work,” she explains. She forced herself to face down this guilt and then let it go. “Let’s just feel guilty and go on living,” she told herself. Anyway, she adds, reassuring both of us, “The perfect mother doesn’t exist.”

What really fortifies Frenchwomen against guilt is their conviction that it’s unhealthy for mothers and children to spend all their time together. They believe there’s a risk of smothering kids with attention and anxiety, or of developing the dreaded
relation fusionnelle
, where a mother’s and a child’s needs are too intertwined. Children—even babies and toddlers—get to cultivate their inner lives without a mother’s constant interference.

“If your child is your only goal in life, it’s not good for the child,” Danièle says.” What happens to the child if he’s the only hope for his mother? I think this is the opinion of all psychoanalysts.”

This separation can go too far. When French Justice Minister Rachida Dati went back to work five days after giving birth to her daughter, Zohra, there was a collective gasp from the French press. In a survey by the French edition of
Elle
magazine, 42 percent of respondents described Dati as “too careerist.” (There was less controversy about the fact that Dati was a forty-three-year-old single mother, and that she wouldn’t name the father.)

When we Americans talk about work-life balance, we’re describing a kind of juggling, where we’re trying to keep all parts of our lives in motion without screwing up any of them too badly.

The French also talk about
l’équilibre
. But they mean it differently. For them, it’s about not letting any one part of life—including parenting—overwhelm the rest. It’s more like a balanced meal, where there’s a good mix of proteins, carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, and sweets. In that sense, the “careerist” Rachida Dati had the same problem as stay-at-home moms: a life too heavily weighted toward one element.